Interesting article. By Jeremy Adelman | Foreign Affairs | 13th May 2015
Hopefully you can read this, I check them out through thebrowser.com.
What Caused Capitalism
Quotes only haphazardly related. lol But hopefully they will whet your appetite and help you see the complexity of economics in the modern world and lose the ideologies that often excuse the status quo.
"Most interactions with people that you trust, people that you love, or people that just need to cooperate with on an immediate basis, take the form of “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” It doesn’t matter if you’re working for the government, working for a corporation, or working in your family; if you need to fix the toilet because it’s leaking and you say “Hand me the wrench,” the other guy doesn’t say “What do I get for that?” It’s not an exchange; people act according to their abilities to chip in. Ironically communism is applied because it’s the only thing that works; it’s the most efficient way to allocate resources. Thus I like to say that you could argue that capitalism is just a bad way of organizing communism." David Graeber
Mod Edit:
- Copyright. Link Each "Copy & Paste" to It's Source. Only paste a small to medium section of the material.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/opinion/sunday/the-self-destruction-of-the-1-percent.html
2 problems with this take on communism being a natural human behavior.
For my family, I'll fix that toilet for free, because I love my family and I find personal satisfaction in giving of myself to people that I care about. Working with a corporation or for the government, though, I absolutely am saying "what do I get for that". I don't love everybody, not on an emotional level. Very few people do, and most of those who claim to believe they're supposed to, but don't actually feel it. Love doesn't typically work that way.
Don't agree? Watch the evening news with anyone on the planet. When an event is reported that involves the death of someone that person has never met, see if they react with the same emphatic sadness to that news as they would if the victim was a close family member. I'll wager the response is less emotional roughly 100 times out of 100, because the nasty little truth is that humans, even those who call themselves humanist, are generally only emotionally attached to those with whom they have actually bonded.
So, stating that our willingness to give of ourselves in small groups implies that humans naturally seek to utilize their abilities for the sake of society ignores the nature of the emotional functions leading to that behavior in small groups and the easily observable fact that those functions don't extend to "everyone".
The second, and perhaps more fatal flaw in this excerpt's logic, is the lack of acknowledgement toward the human tendency to resist force. In small groups, the giving is voluntary. In a communist society, you don't get to choose who your abilities help. The proletariat chooses, and if you disagree, tough titties. Doing something because you want to (giving to your family) and doing something because the government compells you are extremely different on an emotional level, so saying one behavior indicates an affinity for the other ignores the massive difference between voluntary and forced, and thus a huge factor in human psychology.
Don't agree? Look at the bubble vacuum toys that we give to toddlers. As children, they love to emulate mommy and daddy and vacuum the floor. Couple years later, you put the real vacuum in their hands and tell them it has to be done once a week and suddenly it isn't fun. The obligation steals much of the joy from the task. This function is common knowledge. Why do commies ignore it?
